The San Diego biotechnology company Illumina has found a famous early adopter for a futuristic personal genome-sequencing service it offers.

The company said Thursday that movie and television star Glenn Close had her genome sequenced last fall, one of about 10 people to have their genetic data compiled since the company introduced the service in June.

While it’s expensive, at $48,000, Illumina says it believes the cost will quickly become a realistic option for many people. Increasing genetic knowledge should make it possible to detect a person’s predisposition to various conditions and to quickly identify the best treatment options.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is to make this more broadly known and to deal with the questions that come up about being sequenced,” Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley said. “The more we can bring prominence and visibility to this, the more people will talk about it.”

The company, which sells the DNA research tools necessary for the work, previously announced that it had sequenced the genomes of Flatley and Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Close, whose husband is a biotech entrepreneur on the East Coast, is the first woman publicly identified as having her genome sequenced.

Flatley declined to say how many genomes the company expects to sequence this year, other than that it will be “substantially more” than it has done so far.

Close, who won an Emmy last year for her role in the FX drama “Damages,” has been outspoken about a history of mental illness in her family and cited that as a reason for having her genome sequenced.

She said she hopes that as sequencing becomes more common, it will help bring about better treatments for mental illness and de-stigmatize the condition.

Already, Flatley said the cost for the chemical reagents and other materials necessary to sequence a genome has dropped from $100,000 a few years ago to less than $10,000 with Illumina’s latest system.

The usefulness of the procedure will increase, he said, as scientists learn more about the genetic factors behind diseases. Knowledge of an individual’s genome eliminates the need to undergo repeated genetic tests for specific gene markers as more becomes known about them.

“The big advantage of being sequenced is that you only have to do it once,” Flatley said. “There’s no other way to have the complete set of data.”

Illumina has built its genomic expertise into one of the largest biotech businesses in San Diego County. The company reported net income of $72.3 million last year as revenue rose 16 percent to $666.3 million.